Carsten Wicke

Wicke learned violin and singing as a child in Germany. His work in Indian music began in the 1990s with tabla, studying with Pandit Anindo Chatterjee in Kolkata. Drawn to dhrupad, he sought out Ustad Asad Ali Khan, who accepted him as one of his few rudra veena disciples and taught him in the khandar bani. He also studied Dagarbani dhrupad vocal music with Ashish Sankrityayan, who directs and teaches at the Dhrupad Kendra in Bhopal - so his playing draws on both banis rather than one.

He is one of a small number of rudra veena players performing internationally. His own account of his approach is that the meditative alap carries the weight of the dagarbani while the jor and jhala take the dynamic character of the khandarbani.

Alongside performing, instrument making became part of his work for a practical reason. Kanailal & Brothers of Kolkata, the workshop long associated with rudra veenas and surbahars, closed in 1994, and by his account the shortage of qualified makers left players without instruments. By his own description he is first of all a musician, and took up making instruments only in the absence of qualified artisans. He began building his own veenas in 2010 in collaboration with local craftsmen. The Indian Council for Cultural Relations awarded him the Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan Senior Fellowship for Music in recognition of this work with the instrument.

He also works as a film-maker, author and media producer documenting Indian music traditions, chiefly dhrupad. His obituary of Asad Ali Khan, published in 2011, is among the fuller first-hand accounts of his teacher's working life and is cited on this archive's page for him.

He describes combining subtle melodic variation with the complex right-hand stroke patterns of the khandarbani, and his raga presentations join a dagarbani-weighted alap to a khandarbani jor and jhala.